According to a study released by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Google's SafeSearch is blocking safe websites from search result listings. Sites being mistakenly blocked include the American Library Association, Austin's “Stonewall Democrats,” IBM, a U.K. government site about vocational training, the Vermont Republican Party, The White House … and the Pittsburgh Coalition Against Pornography. Additionally, some pages from news sites like Fox News and Wired News were also blocked.

The SafeSearch feature, which is available on the Preferences page, is designed to filter out links to websites with adult content. According to ZDNet, “the feature uses a proprietary algorithm that automatically analyzes the pages and makes an educated guess without intervention by Google employees.” Google has acknowledged the flaw in its system, but challenges the methodology used in the study. Google claims that many of the sites are blocked because they have a file called robots.txt, which limits the areas webcrawlers can access. The Berkman study says that only 11.3% of the sites on SafeSearch's blocked list have robots.txt files.

CHRISTOPHER'S OPINION
What I find interesting about the report is not that Google's SafeSearch fails to block all pornography, but that it blocks acceptable pages. Sometimes people need to take a minute and realize that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. Sure, it blocks some pages that shouldn't be blocked, but nothing is perfect.

It does a good job of blocking porn, and that is what it is supposed to do. Google purposefully made the app so that it erred on the side of caution, as it should have. If parents had their choice between their kids seeing porn or their kids not being able to get to FoxNews articles, they would choose no FoxNews.

Finally, I find a fair amount of humor in the fact that many of the sites blocked were government- or politics-related. Why is it that so many government sites were confused with pornography sites? I know politics has always had its steamy side, but that is a little ridiculous.

USER COMMENTS 13 comment(s)

Google(9:59am EST Tue Apr 15 2003)After 10 months to take in account for indexing of my site, Google deleted my site from its index. After very hard words emailed to them, not about indexing, but about deleting policy, they finally put my site on. Thus, the only working anti automatic deleting policy Google has until now is … email to its administartors. Scandal. - by adipor

Better safe,(10:21am EST Tue Apr 15 2003)SafeSearch is designed to block adult contenet. Google is the only search engine I will let my teenage daughter use because it is so good at filtering these sites out. She loves to use the image search to find Anime examples. If a few legitimate ones get blocked, then in my mind, that is a lot better than her suddenly getting Debbie Does Donkeys or something. I say “way to go google”.

One other comment:

“The Berkman study says that only 11.3% of the sites on SafeSearch's blocked list have robots.txt files.”

What the heck has this got to do with anything? The robots.txt file is a tool to specifically tell search bots NOT to catalog content. If they have this file, why WOULDN'T Google block it? - by M@

re:adipor(10:23am EST Tue Apr 15 2003)Scandal? Without details and/or a URL of your site, how can we decide for ourselves whether its Scandal or you are a whiner or you have material that parents would rather not let their kids see? I agree CHRISTOPHER that its best to err on the side of caution with these things…. but there will always be whiners. - by Untied Statue

re:M@ – only 11.3% w/robots.txt(10:30am EST Tue Apr 15 2003) I think that the comment is trying to illustrate their point that only a small amount of the 'blocked' sites were due to the presence of the robot.txt file on them…. (hence 88.7% being blocked for some other reason) alledging that Google's excuse for “many” of them being blocked for that reason doesn't jive with their study.

Oh well.- by Untied Statue

M@,(12:13pm EST Tue Apr 15 2003)I'm all for “protecting the children” but have you, or your wife, taken the time to try to educate your daughter about the potebtial dangers of the web? Merely blocking sites we do not like does not stifle curiosity, nor does it stop her from going to use an unprotecetd computer. Active parental direction is by far the best policy.Everybody dislikes something, nobody dislikes everything, so where you draw the line is up to you, not me, nor anyone else. If you have taken the time for guidence, you should not have to worry ( too much ) about her behavior when she leaves the fold. - by Darwin

US…But…(1:12pm EST Tue Apr 15 2003)What they didn't mention is what percent of the 'improperly' blocked sites use Robots.txt? They give a stat that is essentially 100% meaningless. - by Manu

Way2GoGoogle!(2:21pm EST Tue Apr 15 2003)Blocking FoxNews is the best thing to protect your child from their biased banter…. - by GoyModeus

Gooooooooooooo(3:30pm EST Tue Apr 15 2003)i worship GOOGLE! life is GOOGLE!bow down to the almighty GOOGLE! - by I LUV GOOGlE

Blocking Sites(4:57pm EST Tue Apr 15 2003)The reality is that there is no practical way to block pornography sites without blocking many other sites that should not be blocked. - by Spira

Long as the Google “Safe Search” is an option I don't really care either way, blocking legit politics or government sites for elementary school kids looking up Pokemon isn't much of an issue.

The way I see it is if you're old enough to discriminate intellectually, then you're able to know what you're wanting to find.

Trouble would start though, if the “Safe Search” was on by default and we were all getting the save-the-children-whatever-the-cost mentally and spiritually cleansed pablum to keep our minds and hearts free from naughty thoughts, the impoverished strata of politics, and the immoral corruption of government. Perish the thought what sort of society that would create! - by Ziwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwiwi

Errors?(7:13pm EST Tue Apr 15 2003)Something's wrong with this study. It claims that four urls from whitehouse.gov are blocked by SafeSearch, but if you click to verify it from Edelman's report (cool JavaScript to let you check it)–they aren't blocked at all. In fact, every .gov page that I checked was either in SafeSearch or Google didn't have a cached copy of the page (probably from robots.txt?).

Meanwhile, the study says that SafeSearch blocks whitehouse.com. whitehouse.com is a hardcore porn site–so blocking it is actually correct, right?

All Search Engines filter sites, regardless of the “Options”. That's what makes them so useful.But the motivation of the filtering is the real Problem in my opinion and the transparency of the process.Optional filtering rules are helpful, even if not perfect. But if certain political views are excluded intentionally without a chance to search for those sites, that's bad.

So a study like the one mentined in the article can be useful to spot “hidden filters”, thereby keeping our children and our freedom of speech safe.

I observed that you actually get different results with google if you access their site with “fake” country information (proxy, Win-Language prefs etc.), regardless of the options set. So some kind of censorship is done region-specific.Just search google for “google censors countries” and you can find more infos…At least they are not censoring articles about their own policies… - by bye Love